These days I’ve been experimenting with non-intrusive cheap smart meters that can be easily installed and programmed with minimal effort. Of course, I am referring here to setting up the metering installation itself and reading the output on the Arduino IDE serial output, not transmitting the data readings via wifi/Bluetooth and displaying it on a website or mobile app. Here is my setup:
- Arduino Uno v3
- DFRobot SEN0211 supporting AC current in the range 0-20A.
- USB A to USB B cable
- Arduino IDE 2.02
The total cost of the installation is ~£46.
SEN0211 comes with a complete bundle to enable reading the amps from any cable. Be careful to connect the blue transformer probe to a single cable (power cable) not both power and ground.
The manufacturer provides code for reading the amps and I have updated it to convert the amps to kW (by making some assumptions as well.
The project can be upgraded by adding a wifi/Bluetooth board to the Arduino and uploading the readings to a website (using a REST API for instance) for display. I will talk about this in a future post.
Once you store enough data you can start performing a lot of data analytics. Check some of my examples in the Data Science section.
